The scariest movie experience I ever had was flipping on the television at 2 a.m. when I was 16 just as Night of the Living Dead came on A&E (this was before A&E was a trash station). Entranced, fixated, frozen, riveted, horrified into stillness, I don't think I blinked for two hours. I've seen scarier movies and better horror movies, but I intersected with this one at just the right time of night with enough caffeine and nicotine in my system to keep me awake and mildly jangled. I've never seen any of the other Romero movies, though I think I will now that I'm watching AMC's new series The Walking Dead. It is awesome, gory goodness with great actors and thoughtful suspense. And they make it clear that anyone can die at any time. It does owe a lot to shows that kind of drive me nuts (Lost, the new V, Heroes) in terms of disparate ordinary people thrown together in the face of weird times, but the actors in this show make it. Definitely up there as a good solid drama. I am a fan of the 28 Days and 28 Weeks films as well as Shawn of the Dead.
This is a link to a NYTimes article about the zombie phenom.
Alex has all kinds of theories about zombies as a genre. I have lots of questions about zombies as a potential menace. Such as: if the zombies eat the whole person, how is there enough left to make enough zombies to qualify as a plague? And why don't the animals turn into zombies, too? Can you imagine anything worse than a zombie horse? A zombie bear?
ReplyDeleteActually, I think that's one of the premises of the next 28 movie. Not only can you catch it from people, but also from rats.
ReplyDeleteSteve is a fan of those movies as well and likes to tease about "being ready for a zombie attack". Anyway, I bought him a book for Christmas called "How to survive a Zombie Attack". He's sure to get a kick out of it. Julie
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